Brokenness, yet Blessing: A Story of Early Parkland

History often surprises me.

Much to the chagrin of our optimism of human progress, whatever we dreamed was idyllic about the past turns out to be regressive. Just when we thought that the problems of our city (or of the world) could somehow be solved with that universal but useless axiom:‘we just need to get back to the way things used to be’, we encounter a little history and realize, alas, our problems have been around for a while.

The story of early Parkland is one such example.

According to those who know their history, the first settlers to come to this area were a family called the Tallentires. In 1851 the Tallentires settled on six hundred, forty acres of land and began building a sustainable life. A house was constructed, children were raised, crops were planted and the American Dream on the western frontier was beginning to take shape.

Unfortunately, that dream disintegrated when Mr. and Mrs. Tallentire divorced each other in 1860, which came with not a little alarm from the other settlers. The divorce resulted in one former spouse moving to Olympia, while the other stuck around for awhile, but sold off much of the original land-claim.

Now it is not the place to ridicule this family. I share this example to make the observation that brokenness in marriage and family has been and continues to be a great epidemic in this area. So it actually should not be surprising that the first family in the history of Parkland was plagued by it. I also share this example to illustrate my point that solutions to our problems – at least this problem - most likely will not come merely by reaching into the past, because the past had the same problems. Unless we’re trying to get back to the Garden of Eden, I do not believe that history can help us with this one.

But lest we end this tale on a depressing note, there was, amidst this broken story, another family who experienced great blessing. Once again, history is surprising.

After the Tallentires, came a few other families – one of them the Crofts family. The Crofts’, who settled in the area two years after the Tallentires, had lost their third child. So, one of the neighboring families at the time, the Sales family, feeling sorry for the Crofts decided that if their next child was a boy they would give him to them to raise as a foster child; but if it was girl they would not give her away. And so it was that a boy was born to the Sales’ and was given to the Crofts’ to raise as their own. They named him James E. Sales and he grew up to become a prominent figure in this area. There is now an elementary school in Parkland that bears his name. What the Crofts’ thought would be a discouraging absence of children in their family now came a great blessing of a son delivered by the kindness and generosity of their neighbors.

Thus the story of Parkland began with brokenness, yet blessing – a kind of paradox at the very beginning of the life of a community.